\n The sight of unaccompanied children waiting\u00a0just inside the border for the border patrol is, to say the least, surreal.<\/p>\n
We\u00a0view this wave of migrants, at best, as a\u00a0humanitarian crisis– and at worst, as an invasion of disease carrying third-world latinos. (I spoke to the latter interpretation in an earlier post.)<\/p>\n
Perhaps what haunts me more than the desperate hopefulness in the eyes of those seeking refuge from poverty and violence, are the eyes we will never\u00a0see.<\/p>\n
For every would-be immigrant arriving on the border are other children who die somewhere in the desert. Years ago, I wrote<\/a> of one such young teen\u00a0who died in an Arizona desert but it appears that her tragic story has been repeated often.\u00a0<\/p>\n The\u00a0Guardian<\/a>\u00a0once posted an article\u00a0about a fifteen year old Guatemalan who convinced his parents to pay a coyote to take him to a brother who had successfully entered the US. His motivation? \u00a0To work and send money back to his bedridden mom for medical treatment.<\/p>\n According to the article, they\u00a0had paid $ 2,000 of the $5,400 of the to get their son to the United States. Rather than seeking a border guard, the teen\u00a0and his smuggler crossed into Texas after\u00a0he had called his father with instructions to pay the next installment. Then there was no additional communication.<\/p>\n One week later his parents were notified that his body had been found in Texas, the apparent victim of\u00a0a heat stroke.<\/p>\n “The coyote told me that he was going to take him to a safe place and I believed him,” his mom\u00a0said. “But that was the fate of my son.”<\/span><\/p>\n I mean it quite literally when I say that God only knows how many others there are whose eyes we will never\u00a0see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The sight of unaccompanied children waiting\u00a0just inside the border for the border patrol is, to say the least, surreal. We\u00a0view this wave of migrants, at best, as a\u00a0humanitarian crisis– and at worst, as an invasion of disease carrying third-world latinos. …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n Continue reading →<\/span><\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3157,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-christian-perspective","category-immigration","category-sidebar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3137\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}